Friday, 19 November 2010

Greatest movie scenes ever # 35

When Corey Haim overdosed earlier this year it took less than 15 minutes for the internet to be awash with people using gifs from The Lost Boys as their forum signatures or posting Ebert's review of Lucas in tribute and swearing that they'd always thought License To Drive and Blown Away were better than The Godfather 1 & 2, but even the ghouls who suddenly declared Prayer Of The Rollerboys a cultural touchstone more important than Spike's Malcolm X biopic couldn't find a place in their fickle hearts for 1988's Watchers :

Yet the love for Watchers is lingering out there somewhere because it inspired no less than 3 sequels and people regularly pay 25 - 50 bones for the now out-of-print dvd release of it which is teamed with Watchers 2. Loosely adapted from the Dean Koontz novel of the same name and generally reviled by fans of the book, Watchers is a story about a scientifically-enhanced Golden Retriever called GH3 (he can play Scrabble!) and a genetically mutated super-soldier creature by the name of OXCOM (an acronym of Outside eXperimental COmbat Mammal) who both escape the lab they were created in during an explosion and who both share a telepathic link, which is kinda unfortunate for GH3 since OXCOM's primary function in life is to kill him (make your own Chinese chipshop joke here if you must but the exact reason he wants to kill the poor doggie isn't revealed until the 2nd half of the movie) and anyone who comes into contact with him including a pre-90210 Jason Priestly.

Realising that the actor Corey Haim actually had the most chemistry with in The Lost Boys wasn't Corey Feldman but his dog Nanook, Haim is the perfect choice for the lead role of Travis who takes GH3 in thinking he's a stray hound, and Michael Ironside always makes for a particularly ruthless villain, as Scanners, Visiting Hours, and Total Recall testified; Ironside is an actor who can curdle milk with even the most cursory of glances, so while his special power here isn't as impressive as Revok's telekenetic braindraining ability in Scanners, he more than makes up for it with one of the greatest "it's me, Austin.. it was me all along, Austin!" moments of the eighties :